Nearly 200 musicians volunteered their talents for ensemble Voces Caelestium’s 10th Anniversary Charity Concert for Palestine on September 22.
A packed Sydney Town Hall raised funds for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund’s life-saving work in Gaza.
Despite facing political censorship and other obstacles, the 1500-capacity hall was packed out for the choir and orchestra performance, which featured Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 2.
The concert, which had been planned since last November, was directed by Korean-Australian conductor Taesoo Kim and co-directed by Serbian-Australian composer and pianist Pavle Cajic.
Voces Caelestium is led by former students of the Conservatorium High School — New South Wales’ only specialist music school.
The school has previously partnered with Voces Caelestium and helped advertise the charity concert, book rehearsal spaces and invited their students to participate.
This year, the Department of Education told them they could not participate because the concert was not a neutral event, the organisers said after the concert.
“As a result, we lost about 100 choristers. We were also not allowed to advertise the concert within the school, or book rehearsal spaces for the concert through the school.
“Another form of censorship was through Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, our two social media channels. We tried to advertise our concert through Meta, as we have done in the past. However, the advertisement was rejected due to the concert being about ‘social and political issues’.”
In addition, the concert faced censorship on social media.
“Meta took money from us multiple times, despite not running our ads. One of our singers received antagonistic comments when they tried to advertise the concert to other singers in a local choir.”
The lead cellist, Antonio Aguilar, whose family is from Haifa in historic Palestine, wore a keffiyeh and gave a moving speech about the genocidal Israeli assault in Gaza and Palestine and the Palestinian people’s struggle for resistance.
His speech received a powerful applause.
Some members of the orchestra also wore keffiyehs.
Another special feature of the event was the display of paintings by a Gazan artist Abdul Fattah Hashem who arrived in Sydney eight months ago.